aka: It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context

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"My first thought when I heard that was, 'I am so going to quote that out of context,' but on reflection it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in context either."

— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw (in response to the line "We may need you to play twing-twang;"), Zero Punctuation, "Heavenly Sword Demo review"note As this was merely the demo, it did not give the context, which exists elsewhere in the game. Hence why this game is not listed below.note For those who are curious, "playing twing-twang" is Kai's (Nariko's adopted little sister) way of saying "shooting at people with arrows"

Examples:

Near the end of the first Hellsing anime, the main villain catches Alucard's bullets with his head by phasing it. He then sends the bullet flying back down the barrel of the gun, somehow causing it to explode all the bullets into Alucard and reduce him to a pile of blood. Then again, this is a show about gun-wielding vampires.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is already pretty bizarre, but there's this one scene where the eponymous teacher, Itoshiki Nozomu, walks on a beach towards the ocean, looks up, sees a giant squid with Big Ol' Eyebrows emerge from the water ... and tenderly mumbles "Mother".

The Mochi strips in Axis Powers Hetalia, which feature Estonia's new pets: rice cakes that look and (sort of) act like other nations. In one strip, Mochicanada ate Mochimerica's daddy, a Lettuce that wanted to take over the world, and was proclaimed to be "The greatest country!". And that was one of the less nonsensical strips! There's also the end of the Hetalia Bloodbath 2010, which managed to be this, heartwarming, and awesome at the same time. Also, Godzilla-sized Rome singing opera. And regular-sized Rome distracting aliens with The Power of Rock.

The generally absurd nature of One Piece makes it a frequent sufferer of this trope. e.g. "The geezer-tree and... a unicorn are having a drink!" And sometimes putting things in-context makes them even worse. Except when you actually read them themselves.

Dead Leaves pull a few of these at times. At one point, Pandy fights off her opponent by giving birth to a winged baby with handguns that sacrifices itself to stop a giant moon-destroying caterpillar.

Studio Gainax. If someone is trying to explain anyoftheirseries and you find yourself confused as all get out, don't worry. They often don't make any more sense to the person explaining them.

Being a Gag Series, Gintama is frequently subject to this (And it almost always gets lampshaded by somebody).

In the Gender Bender arc, Kagura is transformed into a male by a light, but she turns into an old man, with a scar. When Gintoki ask her how she even got that scar since it doesn't make any sense, she says she got it when she realized that she had something ugly between her legs when she woke up from her nap, and she ripped it of, which caused her to get the scar, it's over her eye not between her legs! Then she wants to warn a friend of hers, and Sadaharu, her male dog, has become a horse..!

More or less the entirety of Humanity Has Declined, which features such bizarre sequences as skinless chickens plotting to Take Over the World. The scarier part is when some of the things that only looked like this trope suddenly start to make sense on the fourth rewatch.

Pretty much everything in Suore Ninja. For example, Pope John Paul I did not have a heart attack nor was murdered, but was eaten by a time-travelling Tyrannosaurus rex. That happened because the current Pope, Constantin Vitalian, grabbed two holy relics that together give the power of Time Travel and tried to use them to cheat at a lottery but accidentally traveled in time to the Late Cretaceous, and when he traveled back forward in time he instead arrived to the day of John Paul I's death and the Tyrannosaurus had managed to come with him. In fact, when Constantin Vitalian solved the case about the death of the cat Maramao (the protagonist of an old Italian pop song), the strange thing is that it didmake sense in the context.

Fan Works

The To Love-Ru Fan Fic, To-Love-Carnage features a conversation where the two main characters heavy imply they actually know they are in a fan fiction. It comes out of nowhere and never is explained. But then again, that'll make sense knowing its a Crack Fic.

Astarte is a constant source of these in It's Curtains. Like thinking the plastic Halloween spiders were alive, or responding to Seymour thinking they're all dead and in hell by concluding that maybe they're actually zombies... noting that they can still eat cake... and amending it with "cake zombies."

Films — Animated

The infamous rapping dog scene from Titanic: The Legend Goes On is this in spades. The uncut edition vaguely justifies it by having the dog rap about how the animals are going to throw a party and he wants them to steal food for it (which we see the animals doing in later scenes), but the announcement for the party and the fact that it's expressed via a rap number comes right the flip out of nowhere.

Also where the dog got the basketball jersey from, why the background is suddenly a city in some of the shots, why all the other animals were suddenly there...

Films — Live-Action

This infamous montage of clips from The Wicker Man remake. Watching these scenes in their proper context within the movie doesn't subtract from their sheer randomness and ridiculousness at all.

If anything it just makes them make less sense. Contrast the original, which still has a lot of very weird stuff going on but it's pretty internally consistent as part of the island's pagan fertility rituals.

In Willy Wonka's flashback in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy decides to run away from home after an argument with his dad. Wilbur responds, "I won't be here when you get back." When he returns to his address, he finds that not only has Wilbur left, but he's taken the entire house with him.

In Troll 2, the ghost of the grandfather stops time to allow the protagonist to urinate on his family's dinner (the need to keep the family from eating the dinner is properly set up, but it's never been hinted that the ghost had this power). This may make some viewers wonder why he didn't just toss the food out.

Or the wooden man being chainsawed in the crotch and laughing. Or the love scene where two people eating corn together makes it start popping. Really, a lot of the movie seems out of place when lined up with the actual plot.

The movie Rockula is about a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire who needs to stop his girlfriend from dying and being reincarnated every 22 years, only to be constantly murdered by a pirate with a rhinestone peg-leg wielding a ham bone. He also starts a rock band with Bo Diddly, gets blood deliveries from the Red Cross, can turn into a Muppet-bat, his mother is Toni Basil, and he has a sentient talking reflection that may or may not be the trapped ghost of Elvis.

Tammy and the T-Rex has the premise of a mad scientist stealing a guy's brain so he can use it as a test subject for putting human brains into robot bodies. No explanation is given for why this robot body is shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, why it moves on its own before the transplant, or why he promises it immortality.

Describe a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus... Any skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus... Does it make sense in context? Yes? Then stop talking about Doctor Who reruns and describe a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, instead.

The fact that the show had no general formula and the Monty Pythons were opposed to punchlines, instead favoring either seamlessly transitioning from one skit to another, flipping a nonchalant bird in the general direction of the whole concept of "context" in the process, or just dropped a cow on a skit whenever they felt it had overstayed its welcome, did certifiably not make their show any less nonsensical.

The "Hurley" bird in Lost was only explained in the DVD-only epilogue.

There's got to be a reason why the entirety of one Jam sketch was two men in underwear shooting each other in the ass, but no one can think of one. And the rest of the sketches don't make a whole lot more sense.

The infamous Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold", in which traveling at warp 10 causes people to mutate into large salamanders and have salamander babies together before being returned completely to normal. There's something about "evolution" in there, but beyond that...

It actually makes even less sense in context, given that among other things, the fictional science of Star Trek warp drive says that warp 10 is infinite speed (achieving it would mean occupying all points in the universe simultaneously) and thus requires infinite power output. Yet somehow an underpowered shuttlecraft is able to do it, with no explanation as to how. note They do say it was made possible by a "new kind of dilithium"... Which is a bit like saying you could tune your car engine to let you drive to space, as long as you had a different kind of fuel. And then there's the opening scene of the episode, in which they run a computer simulation of the warp 10 test... even though given that nothing has ever reached warp 10, there should be no data to enter into the simulation. Small wonder, then, that the people in charge of the series, including the script writer for that episode, officially disowned that episode.

Even worse, the distant finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which was written long before Threshold) shows ships exceeding warp 10 without any lizard-people or infinite energy, though this probably signifies a renumbering of the scale. (Which had been done once before; it was TNG that introduced the warp scale that tops out at warp 10. In the original series, warp 10 was achievable but somewhat unsafe for the Enterprise under normal circumstances, and significantly exceeded under a few abnormal circumstances.)

There was a very strange case on Cops where a man walked in on his mother having sex with his wife. As if this itself isn't ridiculous, he doesn't know how to react, so he calls the police hoping they can do something about this. His mother, seeing that he's calling the police, stabs him in the hand. When they get there, they arrest his mother while his wife screams after the car "She's 61 years old! You can't do that to her!"

The Prisoner, a much-lauded spy show from The '60s, always had a weird, psychedelic feel to it, but nobody was prepared for the finale. If you really want it spoiled, you should know that everyone dances to "Dem Bones", the villain turns out to be a chimp who turns out to be the hero, and then there's a gunfight set to "All You Need Is Love", a rocket takes off, and the hero teams up with a supporting villain, a little person, and a mod and they steal a truck. The kicker is that if you pay attention to it in terms of themes, rather than plot, it's not without meaning. It's just... very peculiar in how it communicates those themes.

Ah, Twin Peaks. Sure, for the most part, it was a reasonably straightforward murder mystery with soap opera aspects. But then every so often there'd be a denim-clad demon named BOB (all caps) and his former best friend who cut off his arm to get rid of a tattoo he didn't like and the arm turned into a little person who dances a lot, a teleporting horse, an extradimensional conspiracy revolving around creamed corn, a murdered woman's soul getting caught inside a dresser drawer, a seemingly-crazy woman whose best friend is a chunk of wood which is implied not only to be sentient, but also to have psychic powers, and David Bowie and Chris Isaak as FBI agents who accidentally travel through time. And the normal stuff just made the weird stuff seem even weirder.

The Young Ones: From the airplane crashing into the house, random unexplained time travel into the middle ages, Vampires (who turn out to be video shop employees) in the post, random cartoon violence often resulting in massive head trauma, a genie in a kettle that is boiled alive when one of them makes tea, Macbeth witches in the hallway, a University Challenge team being crushed by an eclair, Buddy Holly hanging from his parachute in the rafters, the very random cut scenes that don't have any meaning and the loose, often prosaic plotlines: all factors that combined to create both one of the most well-loved UK TV comedies of the 80s and one of the most bizarrely set sitcoms ever broadcast.

Matchbox: Don't look at me, I'm irrelevant...

Most events on Sam & Cat sound bizarre when discussing them anyway, but "#BrainCrush" takes the gold - the B-story has Cat putting on a one-girl play. Fair enough, she goes to a school for the performing arts and though her specialty's singing they do all sorts there... but it's about Abraham Lincoln. If Abraham Lincoln was a woman. Complete with long red beard and a short skirt. Luckily, Ariana Grande is too cute for it to come off as Fan Disservice, but still. Oh, and...

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four finale "Restless" is a goldmine for this trope, but there has to be particular mention for the little man who wanders through the main characters dreams discussing, demonstrating and wearing cheese slices. In the commentary Joss Whedon says this is because every dream has some element which simply makes no sense.

Lights... Camera... Action! sets the player as a movie Director filming an action movie, with the lead characters named after various playing card ranks. That still doesn't explain why you need to collect their "cards" to build winning poker hands while filming...

Video Games

"Donk-Donk", one of the minigames in Rhythm Heaven Fever, is so bizarre that the description in the North American version of the game admits it's hard to describe. It involves what appear to be anthropomorphic tuning forks piloting a rocket propelled by their own rocking motion across a landscape of giant flowers and pink clouds, with a green cartoon octopus stuck to the underside of the rocket along for the ride. That's weird even for a Widget Series. The characters don't even have official names; they're referred to in the credits as "Uh...These guys?"

"Working Dough" is arguably just as weird. Four sentient blobs of dough work in a factory with Mr. Game And Watch, headbumping power pellets onto a conveyor belt to give a space ship enough power to escape Earth's gravity. "Working Dough 2" is even weirder, as it takes place in a bamboo forest with the dough blobs resting in teapots, the space ship is now a large tea-sipping geisha doll, and the space rabbits from the GBA installment appear.

Puyo Puyo is this unleaded. For instance, SUN's plot is about green-haired Satan enlarging the sun so he can have a longer summer and be surrounded by women in bikinis. In Fever 2, Primp Town apparently has a forest, an ocean, some ruins, and a desert all in walking distance. Not to mention that, half the time, people attack each other for no good reason!

Most of the reasons you're given to go out and roll things up in the Katamari Damacy series.

Drakengard has a real doozy. After fighting their way through 3 different endings, each varying in serious levels of depressing, the player has a chance at experiencing the fourth ending. Rather than confront the final boss of the game, the boss' brother crushes her, causing the Gods possessing her to destroy the world... with giant, terrible infants. The characters remarkably take this in a fair enough stride, all things considered, although the ending is not positive.

And after collecting all 65 weapons hidden within the game (each often with their own horrible requirements to get), the player finally gets to experience the fifth and final ending of Drakengard. Where the same as above happens, but the main character and his dragon wind up dragging the true final boss through a dimensional gateway. To Shinjuku, Japan. In 2003. And then they engage in a rhythm battle above Tokyo in a game that had once been hack-and-slash gameplay. Even the relevant characters wind up seriously confused for the few lines of dialogue they have.

The Beethoven Level from Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp. It starts off with Dirk being chased by a cat around Beethoven's house. Seems OK, right? Well, then the piano starts flying, the cat turns into a fire breathing demon-cat, Beethoven briefly turns into Elton John, you have to scramble over flying violins and music notes, and before everything comes crashing down Beethoven's coat is set on fire. And there is no explanation whatsoever.

Castle Crashers has a particularly bizarre ending to a bizarre game. The fourth princess ends up being a clown. She then does a silly dance while pink weasels appear on the screen. No explanation for this is ever given.

The Clown is likely supposed to be Tricky the Clown, a character from various Newgrounds videos. Castle Crashers does have a lot of Newgrounds references after all.

Visual Novels

Hatoful Boyfriend: The heroine brings something to her teacher during the summer holidays and he asks if she'll stay to help him with some work. The heroine can choose to either stay and help him; go to the library... or say that she has to claim her spoils of war and head to the distant land of mascedonia, to obtain her reward from the king. There is just no explaining of that line.

The characters of Little Busters! are prone to this. Most noteably is Haruka, who spouts odd lines all the time. Other examples include Kengo summarizing Masato's life as "I brought you mayonaisse", Masato somehow interpreting things as being about muscles and just about everything Kyosuke says.

Web Comics

Describing the premise of Lookism goes from 'Ah! That's easy! It's about a guy with one Bishōnen and one Gonk body, and he changes between the two each time one of them falls asleep!' Beat no… it's not easy to explain at all, how did it even happen?! Where did the Bishōnen body even come from?!

Homestuck is extremely fond of things that Make Sense In Context, but when Andrew Hussie feels like trolling the fans, sometimes we get this trope. A great example is an extended sequence in which, immediately after another character had died, Rufio from the movie Hook dies and Andrew Hussie's Author Avatar tearfully mourns his death...by kissing his corpse on the lips. The whole thing might make a bit more sense when you realise that it's a well-established law of Sburb that if one player kisses a dead player with a live dreamself they come back to life, but neither of them are Sburb players, the event doesn't seem to take place in Sburb anyway, and the whole thing was never foreshadowed beforehand nor alluded to afterwards...so it really doesn't make any more sense in context at all.

Also immediately lampshaded in-series, as John sees the event from Skaia and wonders what the hell he's looking at.

Much later, this scene gets a Call Back, when in one of the walkaround games, Rufioh Nitram (a minor character based entirely upon Rufio from Hook), mentions that Andrew Hussie's self-insert (always referred to by characters as "the orange guy") tried to kiss him once:

RUFIOH: just the other day, get th1s... some orange guy 1n a green sh1rt jumped out of some bushes and tr1ed to k1ss me... and 1'm l1ke whaaat... step off jolly man, haha...

Frederick The Great loves this trope. One story arc consists of the heroes attempting to rescue the German version of Arthur Sullivan from wage slavery in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in order to prevent a Cthulhu-worshiping version of W.S. Gilbert from exploding Ireland.

The First Word has no dialogue until the first word appears at the very end, so lack thereof can to some pretty confusing, difficult to explain scenarios. For instance, all of evolution getting summarized midway through the comic, a girl whose mind can time travel, and a caveman's glowing blue penis.

In "Ultimate Muscle Roller Legend", two gay men in their underwear ride each other like scooters and segways chasing down a girl driving a transforming steamroller. They finally blow her up by pulling down their underwear revealing a baby head that shoots lasers. This is all that's given as a description:

Deep in the forest lived Billy and his charming companions. They peacefully honed their bodies and listened to music there. But a wave of development came upon the forests. One who would turn all to road. Kagamine Rin had come. Billy must stop the construction before all is turned to road.

"A young Engineer has just built its first sentry, and is very proud of himself. However, he is interrupted by the appearance of a Stupid Faice Soldier. The Soldier insists that the sentry﻿ is an American, but the Engineer disagrees. This enrages the Soldier, who eats the Engineer with the help of a special bacteria called Francis. Attracted by the commotion, a Pedospy appears and attempts to hump the Soldier to death. Before he can do this, however, the mother Engineer returns and eats them both."

While the vast majority of Code MENT is certainly absurd in its humour, it is simple in its explanation. The suicidal Oompa Loompas on the other hand, are just there.

JulianSmith.tv, "You In Five Minutes": Julian finds clones of himself who claim to be him a few minutes in the future. The clone who claims to be Julian in an hour is black, looks nothing like him, and unleashes magical powers in fury upon learning Julian's mail package is empty. Cut to Julian in a car with friends, with no mention of the clones at all.

In one episode of Oddity Archive, Ben cuts to a clip from SCTV of five guys singing "Who Made The Egg Salad Sandwiches". If you watch the original sketch, the song is just as much of a non-sequitur as it is on OA.

Web Video/Spaceshipcontrol is notorious for this. Examples include the random arrival of Donald Trump Aliens on Earth, a scene where the protagonist shoots a pistol at a demon while on a swing, a sequence where the protagonist pretends to be in a First-Person shooter using a vegetable as a gun, a scene where one of the side characters is killed by an upside-down picture of a cow falling on his head and a moment where the protagonist dances Gangnam Style for no reason.

Western Animation

In the South Park episode "A Million Little Fibers", Oprah's anus and vagina argue with each other (they each have a different British accent) until one of them pulls a gun and takes some people hostage.

In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Moon Farm", the main characters decide to fly an army of cows to the moon because of an ancient scroll containing a lost verse to "Hey Diddle Diddle" which claims that ice cream made from moon cow milk is the greatest in the universe. We don't know, and it's clear that many of the characters don't either.

From ed.wikia.com: "In this episode, the Eds embark on a learning spree, disassembling various objects and eventually stumbling into a bizarre universe that defies the laws of physics."

The ending of the Adventure Time episode "The Other Tarts". The psychotic Tart Toter bursts into the castle, brandishing a chicken and a squirrel in place of tarts, foaming at the mouth. He says: "This cosmic dance bursting with decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but... If sweetness can win, (and it can!), then I'll still be here tomorrow to high-five you, yesterday, my friends. Peace." As he says this, the camera zooms in on his deranged, foaming face, and fades to the Tart Toter's delusion of drifting through space, surrounded by sweets, and LSP is in the space background, taking a donut. All of a sudden, it cuts back to the castle, where Finn cringes, and the episode ends.

The whole episode "A Glitch is a Glitch", appropriately premiered on April Fools' Day.

In "The Chaperone" from SpongeBob SquarePants, at one point a giant apple chases a woman. The context? SpongeBob and Pearl were doing a dance at the latter's prom called "The Sponge", which simply consists of bouncing on ones' butt. Everyone else has trouble doing it and end up injuring themselves and each other until the whole prom gets destroyed.

Oggy and the Cockroaches sometimes has moments like this such as in the episode "Up To No Good", an otherwise straightforward episode where Oggy has to climb a mountain that grows out of his yard. At some point in that episode, he encounters a disco-dancing yeti that lives in a broken cable car (which seems to be much bigger on the inside). It becomes even more nonsensical when you consider that there's a rope that connects the cable car and a nearby city as if it's been there for a long time despite the fact that the mountain has just formed at the beginning of that episode.

Star vs. the Forces of Evil in the episode "Storm the Castle", a Mexican unicorn who did not appear at any earlier point in the series offers to repower Star's wand. This may also be a Mind Screw.

Pretty much everything about the Cartoon Network show Uncle Grandpa. A Man ChildReality Warper who is everyone on earth's uncle and grandpa travels in a flying RV with his friends— a wisecracking slice of pizza, a deadpan godzilla-like lizard, a giant realistic flying tiger who farts rainbows, and a talking belly bag— to save kids from dangers such as talking mustaches and hot dog monsters. Good morning!

Real Life

There is an educational video made by the Spitzer Space Telescope PR people where a woman gets eaten by a giant anemone.

After a rash of shark attacks off of the Egyptian coast, a high-ranking member of the Egyptian government declared that it was the work of Mossad (think of it as the Israeli CIA), who he claimed had planted Mind Control chips in the sharks' brains to attack Egyptian civilians in revenge for the Egyptians having too many tourists. Even his colleagues had a Flat "What." moment. It eventually was discovered that someone had been hand-feeding the sharks, which led to the fish biting other tourists in order to figure out where they kept food on their person.

Note: When Egypt has to defend Israel from a statement one of their own made, you know it was stupid.

This story on "Not Always Learning," a spinoff of Not Always Right, has a student quoting this trope almost word for word when their teacher discovers a photo on said student's camera of a Transformers toy in a Barbie dress hugging a beer bottle.

This news article about a man released from conviction for carrying drugs, weapons and double parking, which is interlaced with interviews of people in a carpark and a mysterious double parked driver. Its then revealed the reporter was the double parker all along! Then followed with a scene where the report argues with himself!

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